Meet Mark

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Sisson. I’m 63 years young. I live and work in Malibu, California. In a past life I was a professional marathoner and triathlete. Now my life goal is to help 100 million people get healthy. I started this blog in 2006 to empower people to take full responsibility for their own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness...

A Call to Endurance Athletes and Being Coached By Your 80-Year-Old Self

Competitive endurance athletes: It’s time for reflection and formulating a winning 2018 plan….

For endurance athletes, the colder and darker days of fall coincide with the winding down of the race calendar. Whether lofty goals were achieved or struggles predominated over victories, there is always a big sigh of relief for a break from the grind of training and the pressure of competition. There is also a sense of satisfaction that regardless of whether arbitrary goals were attained, at least you put yourself out there on the start line and gave it your best. The off season is also a time for reflection and recalibration. A competitive athlete is always looking for ways to learn from experience and improve.

The Primal Endurance Online Mastery Course is our effort to provide you with all the tools you need to implement a winning training and lifestyle strategy for the 2018 season and beyond. The Primal Endurance approach will help you avoid the incredibly common and disastrous mistakes that most endurance athletes make again and again. I’m talking about chronic exercise/overstress patterns leading to breakdown, stagnant performances and burnout. Instead, I want you to envision a refreshing new approach where you protect your health even in pursuit of ambitious fitness goals and you experience uninterrupted improvement instead of hit and miss performances.

The details and tons of freebie content to help you make an informed decision are housed at primalendurance.fit.

I also think you might enjoy this insightful video from Olympic triathlon gold and silver medalist Simon Whitfield—an excerpt from much more content in the Mastery course—where he offers the unforgettable advice to be “coached by your 80-year-old self.”

Simon reached the very top in his career, but he also struggled and had to reflect and recalibrate often. I encourage you to do the same: don’t accept the flawed conventional wisdom that struggling and suffering is a necessary component of your athletic experience. Strive to get smarter, learn from the experts, but always let your intution be your main guiding force.

The off season is a good time for self-reflection, obtain further education from experts, and formulate a precise plan of action to execute in the future. Hopefully, the Primal Endurance Mastery Course can help—as can engaging with fellow Primal enthusiasts on the Primal Endurance Facebook Group. Email info@primalendurance.fit if you have any questions.

Thanks for your interest, everybody. In the meantime, I’d love to know what you think of Simon’s perspective as well as any questions about training or fitness you’d like me to take up in future posts.

When I was 20, I tried to “live like your 80 year old self given a second chance” but there was a fatal information problem. I thought that my old self would want me to have wild sex, for example. (Not that I knew how to make that happen.) Actually, my 40 year old self would have been screaming to forget the girls, eat raw liver and squat. What would my 80 year old self say? Nobody knows! We can’t know! All we can be sure of is that our 80 year old selves would implore us to learn what… Read more »